Looking sideways

Anthology - Part VII: It was one of the strangest things that ever happened to me. A lot of strange things have been happening to me these days, but this may be the one that left the biggest mark. And it was so simple, so mundane. He just smiled at me, and this was it. It hit me. Like a punch. One I had no idea was coming my way. The best way to describe it, though, wouldn’t be using violence. I would probably compare it to that scene at the end of Ratatouille, where the food critic puts food in his mouth and, suddenly, he is transported back to his childhood. Me, I was transported back to my first kiss with the guy in the red speedos. For a few seconds that felt like hours, I was back at being 20 years old and feeling the shockwaves of that kiss. Just from a smile. It was such a strong feeling that I had to walk very quickly, all the way from the changing room on the lower ground floor, to the street outside my gym. Normally one needs to leave a crowded space because one gets overwhel...

Anthology - Part VI: I don’t remember arriving in Berlin. Or even disembarking at the now closed Tegel Airport. I remember the delicious cookies I got from the cabin crew of the quick KLM flight from Amsterdam, and I remember seeing snow at the tarmac in Schipol. But my first memory of Berlin is being in the 128 bus, on my way to the U6, with a heavy backpack on my back. All the excitement had, at that point, been replaced by tiredness after a 24h journey across the Atlantic. It wasn’t until a few days later that it dawned on me that the first day of the rest of my European life was finally here. I didn't know at the time that it would be the rest of my life, and that I would never end up using my return ticket scheduled for 6 months later. I also had no idea that I would meet someone right at the beginning, someone who would break my heart and my soul in a really catastrophic way. But most importantly, I had absolutely no clue that the love of my life was so close to me, waiting t...

Anthology - Part V: Coming out is not a standard procedure kind of thing. On the surface, it sounds like this shared experience that every queer person goes through in the same way, and to an extent this is the case. But every coming out is different, because it involves so many variables that it would be mathematically improbable for two queer people to have the exact same set of circumstances. For me, coming out was a unique experience, and it started with myself. The first thing I had to do was to come out to myself. To look at myself in the mirror and say to me: you are gay. You like men. You are different from other males. And that’s ok. Once I came out to myself, I had to come out to everyone else. Maybe “had to” sounds a bit heavy, and I understand that some people might not have that option. Or that they prefer not to share this bit of their lives with some others around them (or whatever it is that they prefer to do through the process, because as I said, it is unique to each ...